labnotes on science, culture & history

June 12, 2011

Newton's Principia Mathematica is rarely remembered today for having sparked speculation that we all go about our days traveling across the shell of what is a hollowed out planet -- but the devoted Edmond Halley improvised just such a theory in 1691 from the Principia as he pondered the mysteries of why the earth's magnetic field changes and the nature of such phenomena as the northern auroras.

Normally, in our surveys of the scientific revolution, we speak of a grand astronomical sweep from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes that culminates in Newton's restoration of the broken Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmos by mathematically divining the universal laws of nature. Halley himself poetically proclaimed the same, and gets recognition for wrestling the Principia out from Newton's study and into publication before the world -- and is noted as well for his own heavenly insights into the nature of comets, recognizing their elliptical periodicity and precisely identifying the cyclical nature of the one that now bears his name. If you're here on earth in 2061 you can see it come round once again . . . about 1000 years after its 1066 appearance, which was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh century blog. But I digress.

Hollow earth speculation doesn't typically come up when teaching the scientific revolution, even if Halley in his venerable old age points us in this sober portrait not to look above for evidence of his achievements but to look below our feet, perhaps believing at age 80 that it wouldn't hurt to remind attentive minds of some unfinished business that could be taken on. . . not that what he had in mind was students in a 21st-century class in science and popular culture as his epigoni. As I plan for next fall's scipop class (now in improved, hybrid form!), I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity that attaches itself to nearly every historical and contemporary episode we've grappled with in that class. The official version of the history of science carries with it the aura of progress over time. Science in the vernacular fits awkwardly within that sober frame, and instead tends to be presumed to display degeneration over time: witness the hollow earth, from Halley's hallowed hands to Saturday morning kid's teevee.

In becoming acquainted with Halley beyond his normal orbit -- in his speculation on the interior physics of our terrestrial planet, and its possible habitation by hollow earth beings -- we followed along with the scheherazadean legacy of hollow-earth thinking as related by David Standish in his book Hollow Earth. In contrast to the stern geometric proofs of the Principia, Halley's inner-space speculation appears as an eccentric footnote, but whether that's due more to 20th-century perspectives that encountered hollow earthism-primarily in the light of pulp fiction -- making Halley seem a bit too much like an early Edgar Rice Burroughs -- than to his arguments themselves is a fair question. But perhaps Halley can be indulged his hollow earth eccentricities, given his seventeenth-century context and his intrepid pursuit of the realities of magnetism, which was such a mysterious entity. As one present-day commentator suggests: "Today, of course, one can rather easily see the flaws with a hollow Earth theory, but no one can rightfully blame someone living in the seventeenth century for believing such nonsense, especially if it explained certain mysteries." Thus, with just a bit of well-placed condescension what might look like Halleyan nonsense remains respectable -- if a bit on the free-wheeling side of respectable -- and therefore a forefather of the scientific revolution can maintain his rational bona fides. Even still, I'm not betting any serious money on it turning up much in historical surveys of the scientific revolution.

Tales of a hollow earth persist through the next centuries in varying proportions of fact to fictionality (and despite little scientific support). Halley's idea of a race of rational beings populating the hollow space of the interior planet resonated with widely-current ideas up through the nineteenth century about God's omnipotence, in which it was presumed that planets that circle a sun must support sentient life, as does our Earth: God does nothing without purpose, and it is clear, therefore, that God would have placed life on other planets so that they would be inhabited in the same way as is our own -- "the plurality of worlds" hypothesis. (This idea can be seen in works that tackle scientific subjects such as The Christian Philosopher of 1721 by American Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan divine -- and Fellow of the Royal Society.) Mather's popularization of ideas about scripture and science were read well into the next generations, and is a likely source for sparking John Cleves Symmes, Jr.'s fascination with hollow earth theory. Symmes, a former U.S. army officer and frontier trader, began turning out circulars on behalf of hollow earthism in 1818 (with one sent direct to U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams), and spread the good news that the interior could be entered into via holes at the poles. He kept up a vigorous schedule of public talks across the young republic until his death in 1829. The mantle (so to speak ;-) for proselytizing the theory and drumming up support for polar exploration had fallen more and more to an acolyte of Symmes's, J.N. Reynolds, a gifted public lecturer, as was sketched in 1826 by a newspaperman in New York city:

A gentleman of this city, who, never having heard the theory of the concentric spheres properly explained, had always viewed it as the wild chimera of a half-disordered imagination, lately attended one of Reynolds' lectures. He went, as he himself confessed, in hopes of hearing something sufficiently absurd to give good exercise to his risibles; but soon felt more inclined to listen than to laugh, and by the time the discourse was finished, became a thorough believer in what he had lately derided. Such sudden conversions, perhaps, are not the most permanent; but they are sufficient to prove that the above theory is more worthy of investigation than ridicule. (Quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p. 125).

Reynolds would come to downplay the hollow earth / polar connection while becoming fired with even greater zeal for exploring the Antarctic regions as ends unto themselves, and he was so successful in selling the possibilities, that he convinced the Congress to fund an exploratory expedition to the regions of the southern polar seas, which set sail in 1838. Sachs sees Reynolds as a powerful embodiment of American Humboldtianism, and argues that it was Reynolds, "perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, [who] taught America the cosmopolitan value of seeing the world" (p. 21). But Reynolds's ideas would reverberate transatlantically as well, if somewhat circuitously -- picked up at home by Edgar Allen Poe in some of his tales, and then translations of Poe's fiction into French caught the eye of Jules Verne, who would write Journey to the Center of the Earthin 1864, adding a popular new conduit for hollow earth lore: with it as a foundation of the new (or, to us, classic) genre of science fiction.

Puritan approval, Congressionally-funded voyages, one of the first works of modern science fiction -- the culturally-woven threads of the webs that gird the hollow earth lie not neatly laid out like longitude and latitude, but look something rather disorienting instead, a crazy-quilt line of Brownian motion. Once you get into the middle of this all, how do you determine "what's the bottom line"? Standish, takes a cool-kid kind of stance, introducing his book by stating nonchalantly:

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing -- but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal (in his Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, p. 13).

The cultural history of scientific ideas that were wrong and changed nothing: in my darker moments, this characterization does seem indeed to capture the historical hamster-wheel that marks my scholarly preoccupations with science and popular culture. And yet. . .

The hollow-earth history actually led me back to a novel I'd forgotten about, which had first appeared anonymously, in installments, in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880, and was published about a decade later in book form as Mizora(when the author was revealed to be Mary E. Bradley Lane, about whom little is known). In Mizora, Lane fashions an alternate female-only reality that exists inside the Earth (discovered by adventuring through the northern pole) in which science and technology have done away with the biological need for men for procreation, and which supports a utopian society. In some ways, the hollow earth setting can be seen as just another variation on the ancient dodge of fictional utopian islands, the point being the existence of some other unknown place beyond our sight where an author's idealized world can flourish. Worlds had been turned upside down before by social critics, and a world turned inside out was perhaps nothing much different. And yet. . .

I suspect that imaginings about alternative realities were quickened in the last centuries as the strangeness of the terraqueous globe on which we live began to be better-known and to come under livelier scrutiny. The fact that geology holds a less glamorous place in the hierarchy of the sciences in our own time obscures the fascination that pondering the mysteries of the planet which supports our own existence held in ages past. The vigorous trafficking in hollow-earth speculation in the 19th-century might well provide fertile ground for historians to capture glimpses of the ways in which new visions of an active terraqueous globe fascinated a wide range of people, who then turned their curiosity to imagining what sorts of changed environments would support changed forms of human beings, or of the ways in which ancient subterranean life and contemporary terran life might be connected. That is, hollow-earth tales and their ilk may well represent a kind of hidden history of science, where non-specialists play with a protean set of evolutionary-like ideas in public, impinging on the official story in unrecognized ways. Such stories little-resemble the kind of hoary historical set-pieces about evolutionary debate that populate casual remembrance, such as the anecdote about Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce monkeying around about who was on Darwin's team and why or why not. What did evolution from the people look like? Maybe some of the answers are right beneath our feet.

May 23, 2011

The overwhelming number of recently-published children's picture books about Charles Darwin -- across a diversity of publishers and authors -- choose to feature his voyage aboard the Beagle, leading to a remarkable sameness in approach, in thematic choices, and in the texts themselves (particularly as they liberally feature Darwin's own words, from his journals and his published account of the voyage), even if as a species they offer a pleasing morphology of illustrative styles. As I wrote previously, when going through the books as I was putting together "home school" lessons on evolution for my 7- going-on-8-year-old daughter, the repetitive focus on "Darwin before evolution" that occurs by devoting the bulk of each book to the voyage seemed to me to leave discussions of the hard work of arriving at explanations for the transformation of life over time as a let-down, for that history was rarely able to compete with the descriptive and visual thrills provided by sailing the globe and collecting curiosities -- which disappointed me.

In general, however, the advertising copy and reviews insisted that this approach was exactly what would engage a child in Darwin's story: an emphasis on his youth, the globe-trotting, the familiar tug of nature stories that feature animals, and the exoticism of wild nature in all its startling forms. I was reminded of the venerable heritage of this framework with this post [thanks to the tip from the all-seeing-eye of evolution-on-the-internet, Michael Barton], from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who had as a book of the week the late-nineteenth century volume, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship 'Beagle' -- a work more than 100 years previous which also claims that doing a mash-up of Darwin's book on the Beagle voyage (with a special focus on the animal tales and pictures) lent itself to a perfect child's-eye view of Darwin. (And, perhaps not surprisingly, when I talked in 2009 with Bernie Lightman [see here for recent articles] about his work on biographical treatments of Darwin when he was on campus for our Darwin Anniversary lectures, his view of such 19th-century works of juvenile literature were that they allowed for a conservative approach, focusing as they did on the voyage and the doing of natural history, rather than evolutionary themes. That this tack persists into the 21st century is fascinating.)

But the adventuresome seafaring young Darwin didn't seem to make much of an impact with my particular child reader at home, who, I realized one day when I saw a new computer art picture appear on the computer desktop, had come up with an illustration of Darwin on her own that seemed to owe less to the conventional voyage thematic than it did to three different, more original takes that a handful of children's authors had created. The first of these, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, takes Darwin on the by-now-too-familiar voyage, but gives it a sharper edge by working evolutionary theory right into the narrative, through the plot device of a talkative and knowledgeable beetle who has befriended Darwin (he names her Rosie) and who serves as his coach in seeking to make sense of the extravagantly diverse natural world he is immersed in. Rosie is not only an observer of Darwin's voyage, but a participant in it, literally sprinkling his research records with "footnotes," dipping her appendages in his ink bottle at night to add in details:

that Charles, as observant as he was, might have missed. Often, I would include a little clue to the mystery of mysteries for Charles to decipher, slipping clues on little scraps of paper between the pages of the diary.

The story that follows comes from these footnotes, and from conversations that Charles and I had as he sought the answer to the mystery of mysteries. In each of the chapters that follow, I have copied my clues for you to read. I suspect that you might be able to solve the mystery even before Charles does.

Although Weaver's book is imbued with some of the same conventions as the other voyage books (Nature "speaks" evolution to Darwin, becoming increasingly revelatory as he moves further along each waystation in his scientific pilgrimage), the clues to evolutionary theory that accompany the voyage offer a refreshing change, because both the child reader and Darwin are literally placed at the same level of asking questions and not knowing what the answers are. (An echo of this partnership is seen perhaps in the title my daughter gave to her drawing: it's not "Mr. Darwin discovers," but "discover with Mr. Darwin.")

Intriguing as well is that through the character of Rosie, Weaver inserts a female voice into a tried-and-true narrative that is almost relentless in its masculine vibe as presented in the children's books, especially when the 19th-century sailing ship focus commandeers the bulk of the text. What's interesting in Weaver's Rosie is that it is a female voice that has the scientific knowledge well in hand, and is the voice of authority -- although tactfully rendered as a guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage, for both Darwin and the book's readers. In this imaginative provision of a fictional feminine presence for Darwin's voyage, Weaver re-creates this historical moment in an alternate key, one that perhaps keeps the celebratorily masculinist emphasis of the books for youngsters at bay in a manner that also allows for a depiction of cognitive uncertainty that is more human than the other triumphalist tales. In fact, to the extent that the reader identifies with Rosie and incorporates her knowledge, on second reading the former "audience" for the book likewise takes on the vicarious role of Darwin's tutor (as perhaps both the friendly bluebird and the artist who drew her is ready to do once Mr. Darwin has introduced himself in my daughter's picture).

Given that science is so often presented to children as an opportunity to "catch up" with what adults already know, it's a rare feat that a science book for children allows them to see a "real scientist" as being similarly at sea at such length regarding explanations about nature as they themselves often are. And in fact, Weaver's narrative ends with Darwin back in England and still unsure about how to solve the evolution puzzle (although readers are not left hanging, as Weaver sets out Rosie's clues once more, and provides Darwin's solution to end the book). It's a story that gets at the idea of scientific knowledge as real work, but real work on the order of being doable given curiosity, patience, thoughtfulness, care, and insight -- the antithesis of the idea that only a remote few have what it takes to make scientific contributions (the "Einstein" syndrome).

I was most amused to find that, despite the fact that the voyage figured extravagantly both in content and in the illustrations of the pile of children's Darwin books that I had brought home to study, the picture my daughter chose to draw owed nothing to the rainforest theme which would supposedly transfix childish imaginations, but instead depicted a much more sedate locale, fitting comfortably within the domestic backyard setting of a local neighborhood in the northern hemisphere. And here the influence I think of the second unusual Darwin book, The Humblebee Hunterby Deborah Hopkinson kicks in, for in this author's story the science literally does take place at home, as Darwin's daughter Henrietta and other family members join her father to investigate how many times a bee will visit a flower in a minute.

Once again, this story has fictional elements (while Darwin investigated creatures in his home environment, and the children sometimes assisted, we have no record of the observational study Hopkinson sketches), and the fictionalization allows for a girl "naturalist" to take center stage. (This is Hopkinson's second Darwin book -- the first is a conventional biography from 2005 with the voyage at the center, Who Was Charles Darwin?) The cover of the Humblee Hunter has Etty enlarged in the foreground eye to eye with a bee -- an image that resonates with the composition of my child's drawing -- with Darwin off in the distance, a smaller background figure. Her favorite stories, Hopkinson recounts:

were about Father roaming the world to collect fossils, shells, sea creatures and plants. I imagined myself beside him, touching the back of a giant tortoise, watching iguanas dive, or laughing at a blue-footed booby dance!

Darwin was still a collector, his daughter notes, although "most of all he collected questions." The illustrations (by Jen Corace) show Etty immersed in following her bee as it voyages from flower to flower, answering a question of scientific importance for which the answer is not yet known. It seems that the generation of scientific knowledge can occur in one's own backyard, with little more than a pocket watch and sharp eyes -- even if the eyes are those of a child.

In thinking about the ways in which my daughter's drawing seemed to be inspired by a particular set of authorial choices -- here, Weaver's and Hopkinson's -- I realized that casting an analytical eye on each story was about more than figuring out what happens to the historical Darwin or to the theory of evolution when it is scaled down for children's consumption. Especially in the ways in which fictionalized elements in these books transformed the stories so that they provided imaginative springboards for children to see themselves as participants in science for real, and not simply as "practicing" science, they were about something even more important than the scientific content itself: they were about what the scientific content represented in relation to the readers themselves. Somewhere around the ages of 7-10 American children begin to identify themselves as being "a science person" or "not a science person," when each one of them should be coming into their own through opportunities to experience themselves as competent interpreters of nature. The point of being exposed to investigating the natural world is not simply to start future scientists on their path, or to enlighten those who will not become scientists as to "what the scientific method is": it should be to nurture the multiplicity of ways in which each of us can feel at home as lifelong students of nature, most of all in "collecting questions."

Just last year, the competency of child students of nature became a news story, when a scientific paper on the "Blackawton Bees Project" was peer-reviewed and published in a major scientific journal -- the project being an experiment created by twenty-five grade-schoolers in Britain, in which they studied how spatial and color relationships influence foraging behavior in bees. The project and its publication garnered a great deal of commentary -- see, for example, the accounts by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science and Alom Shaha in the Guardian, along with the comments for each post-- about the state of school science, the atypical advantages of having a scientist-parent of one of the students to guide the project, whether the bar was lowered for the students to publish (there were no references to other work) and more.

Our images of both childhood and of science come heavily-freighted, and we need to understand better what happens when we bring these two culturally-laden categories into contact with each other, whether as abstract idealizations, commercial products, educational efforts, or social reflection. Historians of science typically have spent little time thinking about science and childhood, given the seemingly sensible conclusion that science is adult business, not least in its post-graduate guise in the modern era. But I can't help thinking that we may learn more than we can currently imagine about science and culture by collecting questions about the intersection of scientific dynamics and childhood realities, and how we make and remake our world through both.

September 20, 2010

Last year was the 150th anniversary celebration of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary of his birth), with lots of hoopla in the form of academic conferences, museum exhibits, magazine essays, and the like. A little-noticed side phenomenon in academia was a surge in the publication of children's books on Darwin, especially picture books for kids in the 6-12 age range. As an historian of science with a special interest in science and popular culture, including children's literature (and who had recently taught a class on science and biography in which I made sure to include children's science biographies) I was curious about what I'd find by taking a look through some of these recent books, especially as "Darwin" and "controversy" is such an unyielding theme in American popular culture.

But I was interested for a more personal reason as well: in 2008 I'd begun to pull together a "home school" program on evolution for my daughter (who was seven going on eight), because she wasn't satisfied that she understood how life changed over time just by knowing that there were different kinds of pre-historic fossils and that dinosaurs had disappeared at some point -- she wanted to know more about how it actually worked. (We spend a lot of time in our house on "how things work," mostly when we come across various contemporary artifacts that have been taken apart in order for a certain someone to get a good "grasp" of the innards. It reminds me of what a young James Clerk Maxwell was supposed to have gone around demanding of elders who trafficked in vague and unsatisfactory explanations -- "yes, but what's the particular go of it?") The adventure of putting together what she calls "mommy science" goes into a future blog post, but in this one and the next I want to take up the question of the Darwin picture books as contributions to kids' informal science education.

The most striking dimension of the books is how so many of them are focused on Darwin's voyage as the core for the text and pictures. In some ways this must have been an overdetermined choice: a worldwide voyage has built-in appeal in terms of drama and plenty of room for the "exotic" to be on display as an attention-grabber; Darwin himself left behind an account of the voyage that has been popular since the 19th century, along with notebooks that allow the children's stories therefore to have the literal voice of the scientist inscribed within them for authenticity; and Darwin's role as naturalist on the voyage allows for a presentation that draws on familiar genres such as the nature documentary, animal tales, and picturing the globe as a patchwork of ecological habitats (not to mention resonances to more commercially-oriented fare such asPirates of the Caribbean and the Rainforest Cafe). As an entry into the marketplace, using the voyage as the focal point for books on Darwin hits the educational/entertainment marketing sweet spot.

What I most appreciated about the voyage books in general were the opportunities for beautiful, sometimes inspired illustrations -- the merging of science and art makes for a wonderful partnership in presenting both, and allows for each to become something more complex and enticing than each alone. Because I wish there was more attention to the visual imagination in introducing children to science, this aspect of the Darwin cache was a delight. Even a book that had a more cartoon-like/graphic novel tone that didn't generally appeal to me visually still had some striking images that did, such as a vividly blue iguana dominating the title page or an almost psychedelic drawing of "The Tree of Life" in all its wildly branching forms (What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer as author and illustrator -- the link to the book includes both images on the website, just scroll down). In general, the books' illustrations tend to the slapstick-y more often than not (with varying levels of pulling it off), but the variety of visual approaches is a treat, from the "ye old wood-engraving" style of Alice McGinty's Darwin(illustrated by Mary Azarian in jewel-like hues) to the mid-tone pastels of the impressionistic What Mr. Darwin Saw (text and pix by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom) to the mixed-media collages that pop off the page of One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky, with illustrations by Matthew Trueman. In fact, in my science and biography class, we had a lively discussion of what might happen if the visual freedoms of children's picture book biographies infiltrated the adult book market (for some sense of the possibilities, the stunning and thought-provoking examples of biographies as art in the graphic mode of G.T Labs' "true science comics" are stand-outs, such as Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries and the Century He Shaped, and my favorite of the bunch, Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. And, yes, I've assigned both of these at one time or another as texts in my history of science survey courses.)

But the examples mentioned above don't exhaust the number of entries in the "voyage that changed the world" category. Others were even more elaborate, kitted up as "travel albums," really going to town with the 19th-century naval adventure "life at sea" theme, such as Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventureby A.J. Wood and Clint Twist (with hefty boards and little pockets and envelopes inside with pull-out memoranda, photographs, and such) and Lifelines: Charles Darwinby Alan Gibbons and illustrated by Leo Brown, which uses the conceit of a ship's cabin boy observing the scientist and diarying his observations (the cover features a brilliant blue butterfly "specimen" under a half-globe of plastic surrounded by a compass rose to inaugurate the field collecting vibe.) And there are still others as well -- and after working my way through maybe one voyage too many, I began to have my doubts about the approach. The multi-layered cleverness of using the voyage as the focus began to seem to have another contributory current as well: with "the voyage" as the overarching frame, the potentially discomfiting aspects of the historical narrative regarding evolution are displaced by the focus on Darwin before he was an evolutionist -- with the evolutionary "aftermath" rendered literally as a textual aftermath.

Focusing on the voyage seemed to diminish an introduction to evolution in two key ways. First off, the evolutionary ideas that result from the voyage get nowhere near the same interesting treatment in the books as does the voyage itself, being relegated to the final pages (if covered much at all), and thus one curiously gets books on this score that allow you a kind of "safe" look at Darwin, because it is the joy of collecting oddities of nature and experiencing globe-trotting adventures (silly sailor pranks crossing the equator! earthquakes! volcanoes! painted natives! huge fossil deposits! gauchos on the Pampas!) that are front and center, rather than the evolutionary theories that Darwin and others will develop. And here, the emphasis on the sesquicentennial of the Origin itself encourages a truncated view, as Darwin says next to nothing about human evolution in the Origin, and it is in his later works -- which appear amidst a community of inquiry on evolution -- that you see him take on more controversial ramifications of "Darwinism" (which, of course, in and of itself, does not exhaust approaches to evolution in his own time period). The voyage theme elicits a child-safe book that enfolds evolution into a comforting Victorian patina of wonder at wild nature, with the difficult bits shoe-horned in later.

Secondly, by emphasizing the voyage as an empirical scrapbook setpieces /powerpoint slide presentation as instantiating how Darwin became the "discoverer" of evolution, a somewhat reductionist argument is embedded in the text, but especially in the pictures: that Nature displayed itself to Darwin, he saw and recorded, and evolutionary theory was revealed. (This is especially underwritten by how the visit to the Galapagos becomes the culmination of Darwin's intellectual journey, a kind of quest in which he has been tested and in the process increasingly honed his mind and body into a receptive vessel in which to receive the truth that the hand of Nature -- as we "know" with hindsight -- lays out before him on his pilgrim's progress.) Thus, evolutionary theory was there "in Nature" all the time, simply hidden from view by the tangled vines of the south American interior, and by the blindness of the scientific community prior to Darwin's voyage, and by the obscurantist haze cast by "Christians" ( . . . and how religion and science is understood in the books tends only to exacerbate misconceptions about their relationship in this time period).

It is true that the books usually note that many years of study and hard work followed Darwin's voyage, and they may even present little capsules about some of the other scientists from the time -- although Alfred Wallace, whose own voyage of discovery as the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection could make up an interesting parallel in the books, usually only appears as a deus ex machina to get the Origin published, which is especially frustrating since "voyage" is the governing concept for the books and hence to bring in Wallace would seem to offer an intriguing point of comparison. But if you take the books on their own terms in regard to what the bulk of the pages feature and how they build to a crescendo -- and in what gets most intently presented in textual and visual form -- it is the voyage itself that matters most of all, not the later years. It is on his voyage that Darwin encountered nature's truth in its raw, self-evident essence, where the evolutionary facts are in plain view. They may need further consideration, but in the end, the scientific word is written on the rocks.

This isn't a perspective on the history of science with which I'm particularly comfortable, as it draws a veil over the hard work of how scientific knowledge emerges, is debated, and then rendered authoritative in a dynamic interplay along many dimensions. And it does, again, tend to make for a "safe" presentation of Darwin and science, rehabilitating him, perhaps, from invidious perspectives that have convinced many that the word "Darwin" is synonymous with hidden agendas that aim to hijack scientific thought for the purpose of destroying faith in God on dishonest pretenses. A depiction of a robust and engagingly curious young Charles who is almost a blank slate, aside from his fondness for beetles -- indeed, who is an orthodox believer at the start of the voyage -- as an alert conduit for Nature's empirical truth is hard to square with a vision of a sinister and conniving Darwin out to dupe the devout as the devil's chaplain. There's an undertone of scientific apotheosis that I'm not eager to pass along with lessons on evolution if that's what comes along with a child's-eye view of Charles Darwin.

My own reservations aside, I let my daughter rummage through the books and what she seemed to notice most was just the sheer bulk and repetitiveness of representations of Darwin and the voyage, Darwin being a relatively new name for her and his voyage as well: clearly here was something that mattered to adults, if it was repeated over and over for kids! One day, however, I came across an unfinished image she created in her computer art program, titled "discover with Mr.Darwin." Interestingly, it was not the young Darwin, and it didn't come with a portrayal of ships and adventure, or the wild and exotic. Instead, a disembodied Darwin, his long white bearded face aloft in the sky just under a smiling sun (although with the beard blending into the grassy expanse below), is introducing himself by name to a rather large bluebird in a tree, eye-to-eye, in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood setting.

It seems as if it was another Darwin that she took to heart and made her own, from an alternate set of children's Darwin picture books than those above. These were books that took a different tack, one significant aspect being that they threw off the overwhelming "a boys' Darwin" tone that tended to be embedded within these voyage books, with their affection for nautical hi-jinks and male bonding and the idea of Charles as a salty adventurer. They brought, if you will, a differently gendered Darwin into view, one which was made possible by taking liberties with the historical conventions so dutifully enacted in most of the picture books. And they -- Peter Sis'The Tree of Life, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, and Deborah Hopkinson's The Humblebee Hunter -- deserve a blog post of their own.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 25, 2009

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

June 19, 2008

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are.

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, producedThe Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

May 30, 2008

So how can you make something that is as wide as a (modest) household lot and as high as 100 feet and has the heft of hundreds (thousands?) of cubic yards of steel and cement invisible? As I wrote last time, in what it seems now was the first installment of lessons for science and popular culture from art, it's a very simple sleight of hand: leave it unclassified. As Calvin Trillin remarked in the New Yorker in 1965 about what came to be known as Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles, "If a man who has not labelled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience." The problem in classification had been created through the decades-long labor of an Italian immigrant who, the correspondent from NYC explained, "constructed a dream-like complex of openwork towers . . . and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic, composed mainly of what had once been refuse." A book without a Library of Congress call number can't be shelved, and may as well not exist -- you won't find it in the art section. Of course, even if forced by circumstances to classify something that is confusing and inconvenient and made out of refuse, we can assign it to a category that still renders it hard to see: say, label it as popular culture, not Art. In the part of the scholarly map where I work, the stuff that relates to science but that isn't produced by a scientist also creates category problems: if it's stuck in the ephemeral -- the category of "popular culture" -- it is hard for professional historians of science to see it (or to take it seriously). If it's not scientist-produced and approved -- and therefore solid and visible -- then why would a historian of science study it? Another category problem.

About a decade after I'd seen the Watts Towers, I received another lesson in art, from another Los Angeles artist who makes particular use of the discarded junk of modern society in creating his sculptures and installations, Michael C. McMillen (that's one of his pieces at the top -- "The Box of All Knowledge," from 1997 -- which, by the way, can't be opened. So what is in it???) To the left is one of his recycled pieces on the cover of "Folksongs for a Nuclear Village," a Shadowfax album -- the piece's title translates as "In the Middle of Our Life's Journey," a line taken from the opening of The Divine Comedy. As a post-Sputnik youngster McMillen was very involved with tinkering and with science -- reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, working in a homemade chemistry lab behind his grandfather's workshop -- and he majored in science in college before switching to art his sophomore year (for this and more, see an interview from 2002 titled "The Alchemy of Things"). His artworks often reference technology and science and history. In capturing the nature of his work from this time period Elenore Welles suggested that:

Fifteen years' experience building models for Hollywood movies [such as Blade Runner] and an abiding love of craftsmanship is visible in the amount of technical finesse applied to these intricate constructions. McMillen's passion for junk is evidenced in the huge stockpile in his backyard. Items such as plumbing valves, door hinges or typewriter keys provide impetus for his conceptual fecundity. He likes his process to be ongoing and interactive. In fact, works often appear to be in an evolving state. The viewer is brought into the process of invention and discovery.

McMillen juxtaposes objects to evoke associations and to investigate the fine line between illusion and fiction. The transmutation of matter, how it disintegrates and is reborn, inspires his art. Scientific logic and the nature of matter are terrains that often remain obscure. But he attempts to demythologize them. In the process of building his imagery he plays with the psychology of perception and the ideas those images might convey.

As someone who was set to return to graduate school (not to study cognitive psychology, like before, but history of science instead) I loved visiting his installations and gallery shows, which through the richness of the juxtapositions and layerings and their surprises and resonances raised all kinds of interesting questions about the meaning of science and technology as past and present for me. The artworks were always the effort of one mind seeking to convey ideas and emotions to other minds, but without dictating results, leaving room for viewers to discover and interpret and reimagine. McMillen's installations were partnerships with his visitors, sometimes literally, as when their actions became part of the exhibit themselves. He once remarked that he "wants viewers to interpret his art according to their own experiences. . . 'I suggest, rather than shout.'" (from Patricia Hamilton, Michael C. McMillen: Hermetic Landscapes, 1988).

Suggesting, rather than shouting. . . this was part of what I loved about these carefully constructed worlds of McMillen's and why they seemed so engaging to me. And here's this second lesson I learned, although it has caused me no end of uneasiness in becoming an academic historian of science. Our disciplinary rhetoric, our blunt-edged forms of persuasion such as the scholarly monograph and the professional article, are built on an argumentative platform that seeks to marshal evidence and drive home a thesis, in order to engage almost in a battle with the minds of readers to convince them that they must understand what we are writing about in just this one way. Especially within the history of science, which frequently seeks to emulate the sciences themselves, our histories often proceed as if they were clever, neatly contained scientific experiments, in which we deploy independent variables to find out if our hypothesis is judged to prevail or not. This professional mode was coming up against a set of changing dynamics, however -- something that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1983: that a "blurring of genres" was occurring within intellectual life, with "many social scientists hav[ing] turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." He characterized this shift as a contemporary "refiguration of social thought," summing it up in this way: "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." I could see this shift all around me, as with McMillen's installations. But Geertz's shift didn't seem all that real when dealing with the print culture of academia in which I was being trained for.

So, what I wondered from what artists such as McMillen had taught me is this: what does the rhetoric look like for less martial, less adversarial histories of science? Why not histories of science that insteadview the reader as a partner in meaning-making, that strive to evoke, and broaden, and recalibrate, and suggest, and raise possibilities rather than seek to have the last word (reject the null hypothesis)? What category would this kind of history of science fall into, this kind of art-inflected narrative, one based on picking up the flotsam and jetsam discarded by the mainstream, reworking it, reconsidering it, recategorizing it, blurring genres?

I left California in 1994 for Oklahoma, and haven't been able to followMcMillen's work in person, although the web makes possible a bit of visiting at several removes. And it's a delight to see that among the numerous and fascinating turnings he's taken that he's found unusual ways to bring his reflections on humans and history and science and technology to new and different locations: whether just this last year at the San Jose Museum of Art, for their group exhibition on "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon". . . or CalTech, with "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1)", where visitors would see an "ever-evolving archive of artifacts" from the research being conducted of, he revealed, a series of buried chambers from an underground abandoned laboratory, sealed off over seventy years before. . .or Geologica 42, at the LA Metro Fillmore station . . . or the joint experiment by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Naturalis (the Netherlands' national Natural History Museum in Leiden) that he and a handful of other artists participated in, "Conversations: Nature and the City," featuring his Crocodelephant Incognitus Giganticus and the "The Flying Dutchman" (the porpoise skeletons with schooner sails above to the right). When the exhibit set up in Leiden a real scientist came by to look over the artists' pieces and deliver a prouncement: Philip Campbell, an astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of Nature (his review, "Conceits and Provocations: Artists Reveal a Variety of Responses to the Contents of a Natural-History Museum," appeared in the 16 November 2006 issue, p. 274). His final conclusion about artists in a museum context is that: "Cumbersome attempts by artists to pose philosophical questions in a visual form tend to smack of conceit, rather than stimulate," although he allows that the closer that the artists get to "artfulness" -- which he defines as "sheer visual creativity" -- the better they do. I wish an historian of science had also reviewed the exhibition, to see what further conversations might have resulted!

Campbell finds McMillen coming off somewhat better in his mind than did some of the others, giving him an evaluation of being "conceptually more substantive" and displaying a "sense of visual play that adds to the cultural value of the specimens." He also seems to endorse the statement in the organizers' supplementary material that "McMillen's creativity is closer to the way our brains work than we might want to admit." McMillen himself speaks of his Naturalis creations, which play off of nature's creations, as "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious." Perhaps this is what leads "print" historians like me (who spend too much time haunting artists' venues?) to venture out into the digital world -- searching for a contemporary space that allows room to mount a carnival for the curious with open-ended narratives allowed, even necessary. Ephemeral? It depends on what categories we navigate by . . .

For more: McMillen's most well-known Los Angeles installation is the fascinating "Central Meridian" (and here) which is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you're ever visiting LA don't miss it (or the Watts Towers)! You can also see a quick YouTube hit of a recent installation at Cincinnati's UnMuseum, Speed's Place. For more background on the artist, see this oral history interview that the Smithsonian Institution conducted with McMillen in 1997. Clifford Geertz's essay, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" is from his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; the essay was first published in 1980 in American Scholar.

April 26, 2008

Okay, back again at last! I've been all tied up with administrative work, including a review of our undergraduate program with the generation of new proposals that took much much much much much much much much more time than I had figured for, so I've been lost to cyberspace for lo these many months. I really look forward to getting back on track (or if I can't find the old one, clearing a path through the electron dust bunnies that have piled up and seeing what turns up)!

As my class in Science and Popular Culture winds down this semester its that time of the year when students begin formulating their individual projects, giving 30 different perspectives on how to end the class as they have their own final say. In revisiting the work from 2007 (yes, it takes me that long to convert piles of stuff on my office floor to files that I can actually access, sad to say!), I came across one cluster of particularly thoughtful projects that honed in on the phenomenon of science fairs, with some participant-observer recollections and mini-surveys. I'll start with some of what they had to say about science fairs, but also feature two offshoots that really got me thinking: one having to do with engineering, and the other with natural history.

The "science fair" idea goes back to 1942 when Science Service (now called Society for Science and the Public) partnered with the Westinghouse corporation to create the Science Talent Search, which would spawn a program for coordinating high school science fairs into a network of regional and then national contests. I've become interested in thinking about these competitions as a part of science and popular culture for lots of reasons: Do they accentuate the idea that some kids are "science people" and some aren't? Projecting ahead from what a science fair entails, what conclusions would students draw about what science is like later on in college or as a profession? What's the effect of focusing on science as a "contest"? For a sense of some of the contemporary aspects of science fairing today, this 2003 article from the New York Times is helpful: "Those Simple Science Fairs Go the Way of the Dinosaurs." One unlucky kid with a modest experiment was dumbstruck to find that "kids had boards that were monsters, nine feet tall," and, the reporter recounts, "one judge laughed out loud at his display. 'And it was not a fun laugh. I wanted to take my board and beat him over the head.'" Yikes! Although one young man -- who came to be known as "Cockroach Boy" back at school -- triumphed with a project that did not entail lasers, DNA testing kits, or time on the Hubble Space Telescope, so it appears there is still a place for a kitchen table kind of project, if it's got a great angle (see it described at the end of the article).

Okay, back to my students and the traditional science fair. Students who had participated generally remembered the experience as a good one, as with one philosophy major stating how important it was to have "hands on learning experience, as opposed to reading out of textbooks," and he judged that his opportunity to compete in a science fair project proved to be "important in that it helped develop my reasoning skills with the application of the scientific method." Sounds like exactly the kind of outcome a science fair planner wants!

However, when the student running the survey asked her interviewees "whether or not science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science outside of the experience," the answers were much more varied. One middle-aged adult, the student interviewer noted, made a particularly "interesting point. She believes science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science throughout the progression of the projects and into the exhibition, but felt that without further reflection on the experience in the classroom, she lost much of what she had gained during the process." Another student suggested, however, that "I don't believe it is absolutely necessary for science fairs to bring about additional curiosity within students. As long as they are actively participating, they are gaining valuable knowledge." The student author also was surprised to find, within her admittedly small sample, that the male science fair participants went on to maintain a strong interest later in life in science, while her female participants had not. I love it when the students turn up data that surprises them! It gives me hope that they'll keep thinking about this stuff even after we've all said good-bye...

One issue the student reported back concerned the dynamics of whether or not the science is fair is held as part of the regular school curriculum or outside of it. As one high school principal who was interviewed stated about science fairs:

"Most of ours have been out of school and optional because of the amount of instruction time needed to prepare for projects. End of [term] instruction testing requires most teachers to use every minute of instruction time to prepare for the test. Unfortunately, when projects are prepared outside of school it's hard to determine how much parents have done instead of the students."

Another student recruited her colleagues in the local chapter of Alpha Sigma Kappa (Women in Technical Studies), where she found little enthusiasm for the traditional science fair, which appears to have not been optional. She reported that:

"the general consensus was that teachers mandating a submission from students, in addition to little guidance in terms of expectations, led to the fair being approached as an assignment. The easiest approach to this assignment would be to submit the simplest project, which required the least amount of effort, possible. Oftentimes, the 'individual investigation of something of interest,' which the fair tries to promote by not providing much guidance results in using experiments found in science fair books. . .These books defeat the 'inquiry process' by providing the problem and solution to the readers."

And she's not kidding! When I checked on amazon.com there were a slew of titles offering to show you the way: from Glen Vecchione's 100 Amazing First-Prize Science Fair Projects to Joe Rhatigan and Rain Newcomb's Prize-Winning Science Fair Projects for Curious Kids -- or, if you're not overly ambitious on the prize front, perhaps Science Fair Projects for Dummies by Maxine Levaren will do -- and then those who haven't proceeded in a properly organized manner (waiting for inspiration to strike?) can pay the surcharge for overnight shipping and the advice offered by Sudipta Bardhan-Collen's Last Minute Science Projects: When Your Bunsen's Not Burning but the Clock's Really Ticking. . . and there are more!

This student made a further insightful point: Looking back from her vantage point as a college senior, she argued that the science fair misses the mark in emulating scientific work in several ways:

"in comparing my personal experiences with conducting research in microbiology with my memories of science fairs, science fairs are not representative of 'real-life' scientific work. In presenting my senior thesis, I had to defend my decisions made while conducting my research and the interpretation of the results afterwards to established scientists in the field.To maintain objectivity in judging, contestants [in a science fair] are not confronted by the judges, and therefore, a winning project does not require the contestant to have a thorough understanding of the project. Additionally, 'real-life' science requires teamwork, and science fairs give an unreasonable impression of individual work."

The issue of judges looks like it varies depending on the school district and whether or not it is a formal competition, but the issue of teamwork is a striking one (being mentored by a professional -- allowed in most cases with science fairs -- is not the same thing as teamwork with colleagues). The answer to this artificiality: she suggested that a more compelling experience that turns the teamwork issue inside out was found when she joined the newly formed robotics club at her school, and they competed in three competitions: Botball, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology). Botball is particularly of interest here locally since it is the brainchild of University of Oklahoma Engineering Professor David P. Miller, the Wilkinson Chair and Professor of Intelligent Systems and Chief Technical Officer of the KISS* Institute for Practical Robotics [KISS being an acronym for "Keep it Simple, Stupid".] My student reporter writes that "the purpose of Botball is to be both inspirational and educational through building and programming autonomous LEGO robots. The entrance fee for teams includes a training workshop for teachers and robotic kits so that teachers can continue creating robotics projects year-round." The robotics competitions look like they have a whole different feel to them than do the science fairs, and yet they too are seeking to foster creativity and problem-solving. I'm very interested in learning more about this, as it appears that robotics competitions can reach a wider variety of students and sustain their interest and intellectual curiosity and confidence longer than the science fair, at least as traditionally conceived. I love it when my students turn up data that surprises me -- it gives me hope that I won't stop thinking about this stuff after we've all said goodbye!

But the biggest twist was one student's report about how her small Catholic school, through the inspiration of their junior high school science teacher, create anew each year a natural history landscape through their "Hall Project" that brings the idea of teamwork to a whole other level: her project paper was entitled "How to Inspire Nature Lovers, One Papier Mache Animal at a Time." This is how she described the habitats they created inside the ordinary four walls of their school:

"Once the hallways are completely decorated with cellophane rivers, plastic grass, papier mache rocks, and braided vines, they are now ready to be filled with their inhabitants that the students have spent weeks molding and painting. Fish are laid in the rivers, while the birds are hung with fishing line from the ceiling. Lastly the mammals and reptiles are strategically placed within the forests and meadows. It is now, as the last little lizard is placed on top of a nestled rock, that the hallways have been entirely transformed from manila brick walls into a maze of forests, oceans and plains that mimic the wondrous nature rare to the human eye."

She relates that she had been anxiously waiting for her chance to participate since third grade, being primed by observing the hours her brother had spent in the garage making two blue-footed boobies for his year, the first one which "stood with its head turned sharply right to look for predators while perched on a tree trunk, and the second flew, wings spread, over the nearby waters to catch fish." She was, she recalls "ecstatic" when her time finally arrived: "The Hall Project was something that every younger student adored...it is humorous to reminisce, seven years later, about how obsessed my classmates and I were with all aspects of it. The Hall Project seemed so enjoyable since it wasn't just another science class of sitting quietly and taking notes; it was creative and stimulated the adolescent, keen sense of curiosity which made us want to learn more." She contributed two Australian Sooty Owls, which hovered over a river where her friend's platypus swam. She astutely points out that the Hall Project "unconventionally revealed the importance of respect for the environment, in the sense that [we] built it, so it was [our] job to take care of it...[we] learned to respect the 'habitat' by protecting [our] animal creations from swinging backpacks or trampling feet between classes."

The Hall Project educated on multiple levels, as students crafted their animals and the habitats, wrote up note cards with interesting facts about an animal's life that they could convey during tours they conducted during the school's "tourist season" for the elementary school children and for their parents at open house weekend. My student notes that: "The Hall Project made it acceptable for its adult tourists to not have all the answers, as children and society expect of them; so parents were given the opportunity to continue their learning and experience something new, which is often forgotten about and trivialized in the world of raising a family and paying the bills."

She was very proud that her work had allowed her mother "to 'visit' the Galapagos Islands and Australia simply by wandering our halls. For her, as a working adult, this allowed her to imagine these distant lands. As she described her memory of the Galapagos Islands Hall Project: 'I did not know anything about that place, but it opened my eyes to a wonderful island that I never would have a chance to experience otherwise."

A decade later, this college student states, she still carries with her the message of this novel twist on the science fair:

"Nature should inspire awe in people, children and adults alike. If we could love and cherish our simple papier mache exhibits, those feelings should be exacerbated by the knowledge that each of those creatures actually exists. The Hall Project gave [our teacher] a creative way...to warn her students about dangers to the environment. Following in the belief that knowledge is power, the more children (and adults) know about the world and its wonders, they grow more interested. With interest comes love, with love comes respect, and with respect for nature people are more willing to save it ..."

In doing it themselves, I bet they experienced the natural world in a way that -- even with all their big budgets and spectacular camera work -- an Animal Planet or Discovery Channel documentary can't match.

March 07, 2007

As an historian of science, I've spent a lot of time observing the moon -- at least observing the historical traces of where the moon's path has intersected with the human quest to understand nature, the universe, and the meaning of (scientific) life. I've actually never seen the moon through a telescope, as so many scientific investigators have, down through the years since the time of Galileo (that's his work to the left: one of his drawings of his telescopic moon from the Sidereus Nuncius -- The Starry Messenger -- of 1610). Like a lot of moderns, I know the moon from the occasional naked eye glance up to the heavens when I'm out and about and the night is clear, or from the NASA photographs that became part of the collective consciousness for those of us growing up in the sixties.

I'd always liked the idea of star-gazing through a telescope, but growing up in a working-class family, the likelihood of owning a telescope was out of the realm of what was possible. When I became older and on my own, such a thing still seemed like an extravagance, and, really, weren't all those professional pictures in magazines and embedded within television science documentaries going to be vastly better than anything I could manage on my own with a telescope, rendering my own possible efforts redundant? Still, I always had a small, nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important that existed outside of a world of daily routines that kept my focus earth-bound, with little time to just sit back and scan the sky. (I'd heard that binoculars had come down in price and up in power in a way that allowed one to view the moon as Galileo had, but I never got around to investigating that in more detail -- if there had been the kind of web we have today to plug into in the 1970s or early eighties I would have found a lot of advice in seconds and it might have seemed do-able. Take a look here or here or here, for example. Or, if I had encountered the evangelism of sidewalk astronomy, who knows?)

So most of my moon-gazing these days takes place within the pages of books -- the History of Science Collections here at the University of Oklahoma has an astonishing collection of rare books, and I've had the opportunity to pore over the original copy of that Sidereus Nuncius pictured above more than a dozen times in the course of teaching students, and we'll be pulling some other Renaissance rarities this week in another visit for the science and popular culture class, to accompany our reading of Scott Montgomery's The Moon and the Western Imagination. If you want a sense of what we'll be up to, take a look at this wonderful online exhibition from the Linda Hall Library, The Face of the Moon: From Galileo to Apollo.

But before getting strapped into the way-back machine during our Collections visit, I thought I would take a tour around the web and see what might turn up, striking off on a trail that starts from Montgomery's book, but then which rapidly branched off to other strange and fascinating links:

And examples of "good moons rising" (and bad ones) from children's picture books -- see how the classic story, Good Night, Moon does a superlative job of portraying the moon through the window as you page through it. This is from a site with an inventive educational twist that is absorbing in itself: Paper Plate Education, whose motto is "Serving the universe on a paper plate." What a concept!

For more: Here's a collection of paragraphs from an assignment I gave where each member of the class spent some time looking at the night sky and reported back what thoughts occurred to them: funny, lyrical, profound stuff. And here's a previous blog post that touches on the idea of the Apollo landing being a hoax and discusses the myths about the Challenger explosion.

February 26, 2007

When you consider the magnitude of the increase in scientific knowledge and technological progress that marks the last century or so it seems logical to claim that "we live in an age of science and technology." At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and a point that Michael Shermer -- founding editor of Skeptic magazine, and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time -- argues for. And yet, if this actually is the case, he asks:

"why do so many pseudoscientific and non-scientific traditions abound?. . . One may rationalize that compared with the magical thinking of the Middle Ages things are not so bad. But statistically speaking pseudoscientific beliefs are experiencing a revival in the late 20th century" -- with astrology, ESP, communication with the dead and so forth being held as credible by large numbers of people, along with "other popular beliefs of our time that have little to no veracity in evidence includ[ing]: dowsing, the Bermuda triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism . . . UFOS, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology. . ."

In short, Shermer concludes that such excursions beyond the bounds of intellectual propriety "are more pervasive than most of us like to think, and this is curious considering how far science has come since the Middle Ages" [my emphasis]. This point is one that comes up frequently when the topic of science and popular culture is on the table, and seems so self-evidently sensible that nothing more need be said. But let's take a few minutes to look at the medieval and the modern together and consider some variations on this theme, using the circulation of bestiaries as our point of departure.

Bestiaries were illustrated books of creatures both common and fantastic that were enormously popular during the 12th and 13th centuries. These illustrations were accompanied by descriptions of the entries that combined natural history, legendary stories, and travelers' anecdotes and that imparted religious lessons in allegorical form. The rationale for treating animals in this way came from passages in the Bible that were read as indicating that God had given them particular characteristics that were to serve as lessons for how humans should conduct their lives; see, for example, Job 7:12: "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee/ Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." These lessons were imparted from animals known to exist in real life such as the peacock and the wolf, and others that were seemingly beyond the reality of everyday experience, such as the phoenix (illustrated above from the Aberdeen Bestiary):

. . In addition to providing intriguing interpretations of animals, bestiaries offered tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures, many of which appeared in medieval art. The basilisk, for example, which was equated with the devil, could kill by its very smell, by a glance, or even by the sound of its hissing. The manticore, with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion, possessed a seductive voice likened to the sound of a fine flute. It represented the siren song of temptation that surrounded the Christian soul on its perilous journey through an earthly existence. [Melanie Holcomb, "Animals in Medieval Art," Metropolitan Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History.]

As intriguing as the strange creatures are that turn up in medieval bestiaries, it isn't surprising to modern eyes to find elements of the fantastic contained in what seemingly look like works of medieval natural history, since we assume that in an age of alchemy and astrology a belief in something that can't be captured or witnessed -- like unicorns -- is simply part of a pre-scientific, only partially logical mindset in which magical creatures could be imagined as existing somewhere off the known map in terra incognita. [This description is partly caricature -- in both the ancient and the medieval periods there were some who considered descriptions of such strange beasts to be nothing more than lies or tall tales, and viewed them with a skeptical eye.]

However, at the end of the 20th century on into our own time period, it would seem certain that we live in an "age of science," and that our society would have left such child-like fairy-tale imaginings behind us. Or . . . have we? Let's see what the fantastic birds and beasts contained in modern-day bestiaries can teach thee and me. . .

There are two paths to consider in thinking about "modern-day bestiaries." The first fork in the road leads to fantasy literature, films, and games (think Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and such) which are enormously popular. These worlds of high fantasy feature magical and mythical zoologies populated by monsters and fabulous animals that make earlier bestiaries seem rather tame in comparison. While the modern-day bestiaries that accompany the worlds of Middle Earth and Dungeon gaming fill a niche designed for entertainment rather than instruction, it is interesting nonetheless to note how many hours that many moderns have spent with dragons and basilisks and elves -- no doubt more than most folks in the middle ages themselves would have. Another interesting aspect of the popularity of high fantasy in an age of science is the fact that fantasy as a genre outsells the literature of wonder that is supposed to be the companion of the rise of the scientific worldview in the 19th and 20th centuries: science fiction. You can find a number of places on the web where vigorous discussions have been held about the reasons why fantasy outsells science fiction (for example, here and here). A characteristic analysis that argues that many fans of fantasy are science/technology averse can be seen with this comment to a thread at sfsignal.com:

"Technology horrifies too many modern men, and our culture, as a whole no longer prizes the use of reason to solve problems. Fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart, in that it deals with problems solved by emotion, or faith, or magical thinking. Frodo does not outsmart Sauron: he prevails because his heart is pure, and because Supernatural Fate intervenes at the last moment. One might think fantasies like LORD OF THE RINGS would appeal only to the most nostalgic of conservative tastes: people who admired the romance and mystique of monarchy. But the sense that modern civilization has poisoned the Earth, that technology is Mephistopheles, that we all need to return to the Earth and Get Back to the Garden is a widespread idea among in academia and in Hollywood. These ideas have a natural resonance with a fairy-tale version of the middle ages: if only magic actually had worked, then we could all live as hobbits or elves, in union with nature, without the factory-smog of Mordor tainting the air."

"Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals.

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?

Didn't we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?"

Brin goes on to cite a similar interpretation, from Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA: "Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore . . . The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

Our second path in thinking about "modern bestiaries" leads not away from science but toward science, in the form of what was christened in the 1950s as "cryptozoology": the study of hidden animals -- most famously, such contested entities as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. (These unverified critters are called "cryptids" by those who search for them.) Such (elusive? imaginary? mythical?) creatures are well-known beyond the crypto community, given their high-profile starring roles in many a cable special, not to mention untold numbers of newspaper and magazine articles. And these shadowy beasts have a whole new stomping ground in which to roam more widely than ever before, thanks to the ecology of the Internet.

Even though cryptozoology has failed to garner academic respectability, its enthusiasts nonetheless believe that the search for evidence of the existence of cryptids should be considered to fall within a generous understanding of what is meant by scientific exploration, or at least should be understood as proto-science. However, in a piece on the nature of cryptozoology and science, Ben Speers-Roesch notes that although "cryptozoology is usually held to be scientific by its practitioners," most professionals "find it difficult to call cryptozoology science, often with good reason -- much of cryptozoology is rife with credulous thinking and illogical conclusions." A particular problem in regard to its scientific status is the fact that much of the basis for cryptozoological investigations rests on eyewitness reports and anecdotal evidence, which are considered to be mushy grounds to stand on, scientifically.

Roesch argues that "the idea that giant unknown primates, living dinosaurs, huge thunderbirds, and lake monsters share the Earth with us are fantasies that are at odds with a great deal of accepted paleontological and zoological evidence" [my emphasis]. This recalls the remark above, that "fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart," and suggests that cryptozoological ventures, if driven by wishful hopes rather than objective reasons, are matters of the heart, not the head: how could they be scientific then, under any definition?

We are left therefore with the knowledge that an interest in creatures of dubious reality -- that nonetheless inspire wonder because of speculations about their fantastic natures -- is one with a long heritage, with dynamics still visible today, despite the fact that the spread of the scientific worldview should have encouraged us to move beyond an enthusiasm for the mysterious and incredible. How to explain this? Peter Dendle, in a literary exploration that compares medieval bestiaries with modern-day cryptozoological encyclopedias -- "Cryptozoology in the medieval and modern worlds" -- points out that indeed "No age has been without its share of hidden creatures, and confirmation of purported species has been a vital and consciously debated issue among the collectors of human knowledge for thousands of years." But a key difference between then and now is that, for the most part, professional science sees matters such as fantastic creatures as falling outside the realm of real knowledge, suitable only for the rubbish heap of pseudoscience:

"Whereas in the Middle Ages the educated scholar was as likely -- or as unlikely -- as an illiterate peasant to believe in a given unconfirmed species, in the post-Enlightenment world there is a conspicuous disconnect between academic science and popular belief on a surprisingly wide range of topics. The ubiquitous popular belief in ghosts, psychic ability, alien encounters, communication with the dead, and astrology, to name but a sampling of the 'paranormal,' documents a resistance to the canons of belief doled out by the orthodox structures of contemporary academic science."

In fact, Dendle argues (and note the similarity to the arguments above about fantasy),that "Cryptozoology thus fulfills an important role: it represents a quest for magic and wonder in a world many perceive as having lost its mystique."

In the Harry Potter books, the magical world exists not in some long-distant past time, but right alongside the non-magical world of modern-day ordinary folk, who are called "muggles." It's just that muggles can't see this world, since the wizarding community conceived of means to conceal it, including "all magical beasts, beings, and spirits," as described in Newt Scamander's (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (p. xvi). Magic is presumed not to exist, even though it surrounds the mundane world, the two intersecting only at odd times, as when the "world's largest kelpie continues to evade capture in Loch Ness [since it] appears to have developed a positive thirst for publicity" (p. xvii). Perhaps it's an apt metaphor for where we are today, presumably so long past the middle ages on into the "higher" ages: magic has seemingly disappeared from the cultural map, at least when a scientific overlay is placed on top of it -- and yet it exists even still, for those who have the inclination to spy out its traces on the palimpsest, making it part of their speculative lives, whether in terms of entertainment or their intellectual passions.

The question of what to make of the persistence of the fantastic, the magical, and the wondrous isn't going to be solved by consigning these facts of human life to the realm of pseudoscience. After a hundred years of working the problem that way, it doesn't seem to have borne much fruit. Like the medieval readers of the bestiaries, I think we will have to listen to the beasts and the birds, and try to discern what they have to teach us. To be continued, then . . .

November 15, 2006

Having finished watching the dolphins pirouette and sweep around their tank from the underwater viewing windows at the VancouverAquarium, our group began traveling up the ramp back to the main floor. As we did, everyone walked by a nondescript case off to the back containing an odd-looking rhinoceros-type fish, without anyone taking notice of it at all . . . well, that is, everyone but me. I noticed it because even though I only caught it out of the corner of my eye, my heart did a little jump, just like it does when you unexpectedly see someone you love. And this was one of my first loves: a coelacanth.

( Not sure what to do with the Latin? It sounds like this: see-la-kanth :-)

In the late 1960s, there were only a handful of places in the United States that someone who was nine or ten years old could have seen a coelacanth, but I happened to live in the harbor town of San Pedro, not terribly far from the Natural History Museum at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles -- that's where I came across my first coelacanth in person. Sure, the dinosaur exhibits were memorable as well, but not anywhere near as captivating as the coelacanth, with its lavishly fringed tail fin, its primitive looking eyes and teeth, its armor-like scaliness, and the fleshy lobe fins that seemed for all the world like they could be dwarf legs. As Samantha Weinberg remarks inA Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth:

"In appearance, at least, the coelacanth is less a fish than a bizarre confection of mismatched parts -- modern, ancient, and unique. As one of the deckhands . . . said after hauling it up off the southern African coast in 1938, 'It looks like a giant sea lizard'" (p.196).

Coelies aren't cute and cuddly like waddling penguins or grinning dolphins or furry baby seals; it certainly wasn't looks that led to them becoming pop culture icons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the fact that, in 1938, a creature that scientists assumed had died out 65 million years ago in the great Cretaceous extinction, like the dinosaurs -- known only through its fossilized remains, dating back 400 million years -- had suddenly emerged from the ancient sea and onto the front pages of 20th century newspapers. It would not be until 1952 that a second coelacanth was captured and preserved in a way that it could be properly studied, adding to the anticipation that the first arrival had caused. (No one has been able to keep a coelacanth alive outside of the ocean to study it; a few films of live coelacanths in the water have been made. Over the years, about 200 coelacanths have been caught and studied. A new initiative in South Africa has created a major program of coelacanth research, which may result in much more information about the life cycle of coelacanths.)

Dubbed "old four-legs" in the popular press, it was more than the fact that the coelacanth was a "living fossil" that caused such a stir. The possibility that coelacanths might well be the "missing" evolutionary link between the first sea creatures and the first tetrapods that had crawled out of the ocean and on to land, giving rise eventually to human beings, made them the source of widespread fascination. And perhaps the coelacanth's renown was given an extra boost in that the Leakeys were unearthing "early man" in Africa, and the idea of being able to at last fill in significant gaps in the great evolutionary story of life (the ones relating to us :-) seemed to be at hand.

When I became a scholar and began thinking about the nature of science in popular culture, my enduring interest in coelacanths has never been far from my mind. For one thing, the existence of coelacanths represents one of the scientific experiences that spurred my interest in studying nature -- and most of these experiences had nothing to do with the science I learned in the classroom up through high school, via textbooks or laboratory demonstrations. The science I most loved rarely showed up in class; the science I was exposed to in class rarely enthused me (don't ever get me started on the tedium of rolling steel balls down inclined planes or of titrations of potassium permanganate).

So what happens when the two paths rarely cross -- or two species of thought fail to cross-fertilize? Welcome to my world! I'm still working on it. In many respects, that early love of coelacanths put me on the path to wanting to understand science in the vernacular.

I think that one important idea that the coelacanth conveyed to me, in the midst of the self-congratulatory high that the space race brought to the US in the 1960s, was of how little we knew about our own planet, particularly the three-fourths of the globe covered by oceans and seas. My own sense of nature was overwhelmingly shaped by my proximity to the ocean as a growing organism, and I was beginning to suspect that a vernacular-derived metaphysics and epistemology that was aqueous-based differs from those that are terra-formed or aether-filled. This has got me thinking, so look for a blog entry sometime this spring on "Thinking Like an Ocean," which will be part of the analysis for the next book I'm writing.

The South African Minister however deplored the low standards of science in his country and Africa at large, given the lack of resources. "Public scientific output remains low, and in critical areas, such as securing patents, and new fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, there is a limited institutional capacity to respond adequately," he complained.

The African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme however stood out as an important and well-functioning "high-profile flagship programme" for science in South Africa and the region, Mr Mangena pointed out. Through ACEP, science authorities had caused popular excitement by "ships, sea exploration, sophisticated instrumentation, and new discoveries that extend the frontiers of science to capture the imagination of the youth, and inspire them to take an interest in science."

Coelacanths continue to surprise us, popping up in 1997 10,000 kilometres away from the African coast in Indonesia, where UC Berkeley researcher Mark Erdmann spotted a coelacanth carcass being hauled off to market. The existence of the Indonesian coelacanths surprised the scientific world, although it turns out that Sulawesian fishermen were quite familiar with the fish they called raja laut, or "king of the sea" -- the Comoran fishermen also had a name for the oily, inedible fish they sometimes accidently caught: gombessa. Makes you think about what it means when we say that a species has been "unknown" -- unknown, that is, until it is discovered by outsiders.

An aside: "My" childhood coelie appears to have been the result of a UCLA researcher in 1964 initiating the first major international expedition to the Comoros Islands off of Madagascar, the coelacanth habitat that had been previously open only to French scientists (see Malcolm S. Gordon, "The international program of research on Latimeria in the 1960s," Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1993, 36:407-14). After their analysis was complete, their coelacanth was sent to LA County's Natural History Museum, and no doubt would have been something of a local celebrity when I visited it.

Ten years later, as a UCLA student, I walked through the doors of the campus Life Sciences building, and came face-to-face with another coelacanth, much to my surprise (it was probably a cast taken of that first one). It still had the power to give me a small electrifying jolt, unlike the dozens of other students who passed it by without a second look. Every now and then, I'd visit it, just to take a small step back in time amidst the stress of the present; it always pleased me to see it there. I wonder if it's still on display?